2016 marks eight years of Ride the City providing bicycling directions -- first in New York City and now in 50 cities worldwide (including in major cities in Spain, France, Australia, Canada, and several other international cities). This project has been an extreme joy and a challenge. It's been great to be a part of a service that's been useful for bicyclists, and that has helped generate more interest and discussion about biking and the challenges surrounding safe bike routing. It's also been great supporting the OpenStreetMap project.

I had the pleasure of attending a talk tonight about a guy named Jamie Bianchini who rode a tandem bike around the world, and along the way he picked up strangers and invited them to ride along.

He started charities, helped towns improve their water and get schools going, and introduced people to the bicycle who had never seen one. What a great and amazing story about slowing down and making friends that cross cultural, language, and religious boundaries. Jamie is an inspiring fella.

Cranksgiving is a food drive on two wheels. Part bike ride, part charity, part scavenger hunt, it has been held in New York City since 1999, and has expanded to dozens of cities as a grassroots event since then. Last year in New York City, more than 350 riders collected over 1,445 pounds of canned goods, cranberry sauce, potatoes, stuffing, corn, pasta, baby food, pies, and 7 whole turkeys for The Bowery Mission. Plus they donated 700 jars of baby food to Nazareth Housing & The New York Foundling.

Today's post is for an event coming up this weekend in Asheville, NC. Ok, so Halloween is over but a snow day in the mountains was no excuse to cancel a yearly bike ride to celebrate costume and bicycling.

Asheville on Bikes moved their yearly costumed Halloween ride, the Pumpkin (and now Pilgrim) Pedaller, to this upcoming Saturday, November 8th. Come dressed in costume, or not.

Today's the unveiling of Las Bicicletas, a collection of bicycle sculptures located in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The art pieces are colorful silhouettes of bicycles, created by a great Mexican painter and sculptor, Gilberto Aceves Navarro.

As bike month rolls to a close in Fort Collins, Colorado, we're happy to launch Ride the City - FoCoCo. Fort Collins is currently one of only four cities to have received the Platinum rating as a Bicycle Friendly Community, from the League of American Bicyclists. (Here's the full list.) According to the data, the percentage of arterial streets in Fort Collins with dedicated bicycle facilities is 76-99%, and nearly 7% of commuters travel by bicycle. Nice.

We typically only write about bicycles here but today's post is a bit more general, it's about energy. Energy is the lifeblood of today's world. We use many types of energy everyday for various purposes: to heat & cool our homes, to keep our lights and gadgets running, to manufacture everything we consume, to transport our goods, and to fly us around the world, just to name a few.

The U.S. is massive consumer of energy; we gobble up about a quarter of the world's energy with less than 5% of the world populaion. Oil in particular is becoming a scarcer commodity. That's one reason the U.S. has been on a fracking binge the last handful of years, and has made tremendous gains but certainly not without a cost to water and air quality. Collectively the world burns about 1000 barrels of oil every second, so it's no wonder that companies are willing to frack anywhere they can, explore the deepest oceans and mine tar sands to get any oil that's available.

Well, there's also human energy. Bicycling is a healthy and fun way to reduce your energy consumption, and every day you ride your bicycle you are a small part of the active transportation movement.

Bicycling in the Netherlands has been popular and supported by good design for generations. It's a place that every bicyclist should visit at some point, if only to see how incredibly streets can support bicycling.